Nuclear power in Ireland

Cheap small reactors don't exist yet.

Reliable small reactors have been used in submarines since the 1950's. They aren't remotely cheap. The UK recently had all 7 of it's attack subs offline but they kept at least one of the four mission critical missile subs going at all times. So possibly not as reliable unless you are prepared to throw lots of resources at them.

Rolls Royce won't commit to develop unless there's something like £20-30Bn worth of firm orders in the bag. Come back 20 years after they get serious funding to see if they work as advertised.

And we can't even be certain the missile subs work.

* Lord Buckethead - If you can't trust an intergalactic space lord who can you trust ?

Nuclear baseload is impossible in Ireland. Only 25% of demand needs to come from synchronous generators or compensators and that's well covered by the geographically separated units that are needed to provide voltage and frequency across the grid.

Nuclear diverts resources away from renewables and storage eg: Hinkley C will cost €27-28bn (and £80 bn extra on fuel bills)

Last year the average was 90% but it dropped below 80% from 17/10 to 4/11 with 2 days at 75% ( 27-26/10/2021 )

That's weeks of backup needed unless you plan on building one spare nuclear plant for every three you need operational.

Nuclear provides about 10% of the worlds electricity or 4% of primary energy. There's 90 years of economic uranium reserves left at current usage so nuclear could decarbonise about 3.6 years of global energy. Since the initial fuelling up of a reactor takes about 3 years worth of uranium you might not even get close.

Uranium is $20/Kg. Even if you looked at low grade ores of $260/Kg you get one fuel load and 2 years 4 months of additional fuel.

Hinkley C is €27Bn so that's €13.5Bn per reactor. But the UK weren't the only ones to get suckered by the cost and delays.

The EPR in Finland, Olkiluoto-3 was initially put at €3.2bn, but in 2012 Areva estimated the overall cost at closer to €8.5bn. Since then, it has not made public any updated cost projection. And it's 12 years late.

On the 11th of Jan EDF announced that Flamaville 3 has been delayed another six months so pushed back to a 2024 start, only 11 years late and counting. Cost increased again from €12.4Bn to €12.7Bn "In 2015 euros and excluding interim interest" not to mention the costs of getting power elsewhere during the delay. (Was originally costed at €3.3Bn in 2005 values)

But the UK agreed to the strike price that will likely see another €80Bn lifetime cost added to that power station.

Last year Spain allocated 3GW of solar and wind at an average price of €24.47/MWh. The offer was oversubscribed with 9.7GW capacity submitted. Burning electrolysed hydrogen in gas turbines would give you an overall efficiency of 40%. So you'd need to spend €61.18 per MWh at the other end of a pipeline.

That's less than half the Hinkley C discounted strike price of €127.44/MWh.

The €9.5Bn Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which can carry 55 billion m3 of gas a year over a distance of 1,200Km. That's 10 times our annual usage of natural gas. Hydrogen has 1/3rd the energy per m3 though even so it's still over three times our annual usage of gas.

It's 900Km from Ferrol in Spain to Kinsale. 1,080Km to San Sebastian if you stay on the continental shelf or Brest in France would be 450Km undersea if you wanted to use existing networks to transport gas

Germany can't start reactors without another public referendum. Nuclear power can't escape politics. Politics can help it escape economics.

Korea has had it's share of nuclear snafu's. A fake parts scandal took large parts off the grid with no advance warning. Right now the plan is to phase out nuclear plants when they reach their design life. Korea depends more on coal 15% than nuclear 10%.

The UAE plant is years late. And costs nearly doubled from $18Bn to $32Bn in 2018 (costs on this one aren't fully clear since it's 3 out of the 4 reactors are still under construction.)

Citation needed : because that's not how auctions / strike price / contract for difference works or any of this works - Even for offshore wind the UK is down to £46/MWh over 15 years on contract for difference which represents the maximum price.

Please explain how nuclear can be cost competitive with renewables backed up by hydrogen stored in disused gas fields like Kinsale ?

What you recommend for dispatchable peaking plant because demand varies a lot during the day and there's extra demand in winter ?

Annual demand for natural gas for heating and electricity in Ireland is 5 billion m3. To give an idea of how little it would cost to store it, the UK tried to save £750m over 10 years by closing the 30 year old 3.31 billion m3 Rough storage facility.

There are, I've posted them. Even mad crazy schemes like making hydrogen in Spain and a Nordstream II pipeline to deliver it are coming in way under the cost of one nuclear power plant for capital cost and electricity cost. Storage costs of £75m a year for 2/3rds of our annual gas usage are a rounding error compared to nuclear overruns.

Only some high strength steel alloys suffer from hydrogen embrittlement. Pipes can be lined from the inside.

Hydrogen is leaky so I can't see it being used for cars. But grid level storage under a couple hundred meters of rock, that's already being done. ICI used to store lots of different gases off Teeside.

Burning hydrogen in a computer controlled 600MW gas turbine is a little different to using it in an internal combustion engine like de Rivaz did in 1807 with the first hydrogen car.

And hydrogen wouldn't be needed while there's enough wind or sunshine and we have the kit to harvest them.

US capacity factor may average 90% over a full year (if you ignore things like early retirement) but it dropped to near 75% for a few weeks back in October. It's not as 24/7 as advertised and needs a lot of redundancy. Hywind averaged 57.1% capacity factor last year which drastically reduces storage requirements for wind.

The more you look at nuclear the worse it gets.

If you assume a payback time of 30 years then best you can do is to triple annual nuclear power production. And that's in the face of increased demand for heat pumps, electric cars and industrial decarbonisation which will see demand soar.

Nuclear can't scale up without becoming even more uneconomic. When you double cost of extraction you only increase the recoverable uranium by a quarter.

Yes fuel is cheap enough at $94/kg. But that price has doubled since 2018 and there's lots of speculators in the market now.

For a recovery cost of $130/Kg present uranium reserves are 6m tonnes. So there's enough uranium to keep today's 400 reactors going for 100 years. But they only provide 10% of today's electrical demand or 10 years worth of global electrical demand. Or 3 years worth of total energy demand and the initial fuelling of a reactor takes ~3 years worth of fuel.

Rolls Royce want a £32Bn order before they start making SMR's. Then they say you'll have to wait only 20 years to get just 7GW. So you will have to depend on other low carbon power

You will notice that only the French, Russians, Chinese and South Koreans are still providing reactors since the Japanese and US companies more or less folded. You don't want to owe the Russians or Chinese money while they have direct or indirect control over your infrastructure. The French EPR design is a money pit that hasn't been debugged. They have a LONG history of problems with welds on the EPR's and previous generations of reactors.

That leaves the South Koreans. UAE signed a deal in $18.6Bn in 2009 for four reactors of which only one is fully operational. "Kepco said the deal will bring it about $49.4 billion in profits over 60 years"

If the UK who've been doing nuclear power since the 1950's and France who have the largest % of power from nuclear and with financial backing from both governments are dragging their heels over a new power plant and needing Chinese money to keep the project going then perhaps we should wait to see how it goes.

ESB International are their own consultancy company so there's that.